A few years ago I designed a way to detect bit-flips in Firefox crash reports and last year we deployed an actual memory tester that runs on user machines after the browser crashes. Today I was looking at the data that comes out of these tests and now I'm 100% positive that the heuristic is sound and a lot of the crashes we see are from users with bad memory or similarly flaky hardware. Here's a few numbers to give you an idea of how large the problem is. 🧵 1/5
I have device that has ECC ram and I can keep it online and applications running for well over 18 months with no stability issues.
However, both my work computers and my personal computer start to become unstable after about 15 to 20 days. And degrade over the course of 1 to 2 years (with a considerable increase in the number of corrupt system files)
Firefox and chrome start to become unstable after usually a week if they have really high memory usage.
This checks out with Linus Torvalds saying most OS crashes across linux AND windows are caused by hardware issues, and also why he uses ECC RAM.
Honestly yeah it’s 100% checks out.
I have device that has ECC ram and I can keep it online and applications running for well over 18 months with no stability issues.
However, both my work computers and my personal computer start to become unstable after about 15 to 20 days. And degrade over the course of 1 to 2 years (with a considerable increase in the number of corrupt system files)
Firefox and chrome start to become unstable after usually a week if they have really high memory usage.
Can confirm, my linux server with ECC RAM has 1040 days of uptime now without a single issue.